I have a PhD in CS. There's a lot of "drudge work" in the design and execution of experiments. I just spent four days designing, executing and analyzing experiments to see if our model was accurate and my implementation was correct. (Both are, which is nice.) But those experiments will never be published - experiments like them will, but not those. Those experiments are what I call "guiding experiments" - they're not rigorous enough to convince others that what we did works, but it's enough to convince me we're doing the right thing, and give me the confidence that things will work out as expected when we do the full, rigorous experiments.

So, yes, research has its own grunt work. And some of my code will make it into production.